Geek/Writer Rambles Ignorantly About Shit

Tshinanu Reviews – Flash: All-Star Team Up

In a post Daredevil world, the television landscape for superheroes is hardly alike and I couldn’t help but keep that in mind whilst watching Flash, nevertheless, I still try to appreciate the show for its own merit. After all, Daredevil is far more akin to the Arrow than it is to the Flash. This is also the second team-up we’ve had this season for the Flash/Arrow, and the first time we see Ray Palmer put his suit to action against a legitimate villain.

Let it be said, you can immediately tell that there’s obviously some lack of communication on the part of both shows, after all, we’re coming hot off the heels of Roy and Oliver getting arrested for their crimes as the Arrow and it would not make sense for them to be here, I’m sure Atom’s suit could wait. I think, in this case, Arrow’s episode probably should have preceded Flash because the timelines are sort of all skewed. I’ll let that go, after all, it’s not often we get to see super heroes team-up (well other than the big periodic Avengers movie, and the Defenders will certainly be attempting the same in a few years).

Okay this has nothing to do with the episode.

The biggest flaw in Flash and Arrow and more or less any CW show is the love angles which often appear badly written, cliché’d (that’s not to say cliché’s are inherently bad but CW does it in the exact same manner in all of their worlds). In fact, it’s the sole guarantee you can expect from any CW show. This time around, we had to deal with Iris immediately start feeling the effects of Eddy’s knowing the identity of Flash, this was admittedly weakly done. There wasn’t any build-up to it and I found it hard to believe that simply know that Barry is Flash would so drastically alter Iris’s perception of Eddy.

At the very least we got some great interactions to offset the balance of that short date sequence and the awful Iris/Barry, Iris/Eddy moments (and yes, Iris is progressively climbing the ladder to meet up with Felicity and Laurel on the badly written love interests, oddly enough Laurel jumping out of that role is definitely helping to make her a likeable character). Cisco and Ray played off well together, and Detective West’s interactions with anyone are usually sound. Furthermore, Felicity’s sole enjoyable sequences lately are when she’s not trying to make Oliver guilty about whatever decision he’s made, which means she’s just enjoying herself with Barry and Ray.

But I had to get them all down.

Ray and Felicity together are awesome and I did genuinely laugh out loud at that ‘keep it up’ sex joke. Sure it was a bit on the nose but that’s where Felicity humor comes from and that was why most fans were rooting for her before she became a legitimate interest for Oliver and turned into a well, whinier character.

The villain of the week was that chick from The Walking Dead (no I don’t watch The Walking Dead, I detest it in fact) whom controlled robotic bees. Of course, how was she defeated? By deciding to take her time with complaints before taking out her former boss at Mercury Labs (she spared her former peers no such consideration though). Barry had to be dumbed down to actually make the Bug-Eyed Bandit a credible villain, and alas that’s the issue with having a guy with time travel level speed.

Where’s Deathstroke though?

The other issue Barry was dealing with this week was Mr. West telling him he should off on telling Caitlin and Cisco for fear they might be working with Dr. Wells and to be fair, those are very valid arguments, if he hadn’t discussed it with Cisco a few weeks back already. Felicity tried to convince him but I found the argument flawed considering it could easily apply to Dr. Wells too. In the end, Diggle is to Oliver as Felicity is to Barry and he soundly listened to her advice and decided to tell Caitlin and Cisco (Detective there had no objections about it). Cisco’s undercurrent of flashbacks (I can’t even call it that since it was more like he was seeing what happened to other timeline Cisco, I don’t know the logic behind it either) allowed him to confirm what they were all suspecting. So now they’re all in on trying to figure out who the fuck is Harrison Wells.

Overall, it was a solid episode, more of what I expect from it, generally weak villains of the week and frustrating love issues with the show doing well when it let loose with some fun character interactions and the slowly progressing major storyline. I’ll give it a thumbs up, and the next episode is bound to bring things forward now that we’re full on the Harrison Wells is Reverse-Flash boat.